“Course. We had to know we’d be able to use our things when the government killed the power and shorted out all the electric circuits,” Jack replied, like he wasn’t repeating the most insane conspiracy theory ever. “Took ages to build it, but Thomas said it was important.”
Important. Right. If you were paranoid as fuck and thought the entire world was out to get you. If you were stealing vehicles and who knew what else and storing it all in one big warehouse just in case something bad happened.
He should have guessed there would be something exactly like this in this town. And maybe he would have, if he’d even known that things like this existed.
The bigger question was whether it had worked.
“I don’t know much about that technology,” Marie said suddenly. “But isn’t it usually… small? Will it even work in a space this big?”
“Everything’s always worked in here,” Jack said quickly. “We’ve never had a problem.”
“But have you used the trucks?” Pete asked.
There was a long, pregnant pause from the backseat. One that spoke volumes. “No,” Jack finally said quietly.
“Terrific,” Pete breathed. “Well, only one way to find out.”
He grabbed the keys, took a deep breath, and then turned, praying like he’d never prayed before that the truck would give him more than just the clicking of a defunct automobile.
It took a second. Even if these trucks were still working, Jack made it sound like they’d been sitting here for some time. They weren’t going to turn on easily. Pete grunted, his heart hammering away at his ribs with tension.
And then the truck’s engine came roaring to life.
He didn’t wait to hear what Marie or Jack thought of that. He hit the gas, aimed for the garage door he could now see, and broke for freedom. They were going to have to tear through the door—unless there was some sort of garage door opener in here—but they didn’t have time to do this the nice way.
For all he knew, the villagers were out there in front of the door with grenade launchers, ready to blow this whole place up just to kill the Big, Bad Strangers.
If they were, he was planning to mow them over before they got the chance to pull that trigger.
They were going to die. But better them than Pete, Marie, and Jack. And as far as he was concerned, they had it coming.
To hell with them.
They came out of the warehouse like the Dukes of Hazzard, literally flying through the air because some genius had decided to back the warehouse up to a gully.
Luckily, they did it at about 30 MPH, which meant they had enough momentum to carry it off.
They hit the ground with such a crash that Pete thought they had definitely wrecked the truck, and the tires skidded out for several seconds before they found purchase. After that, though, they went squealing through the snow toward what counted as a road in these parts.
Pete had been right about the villagers. At least partially. They hadn’t been standing in front of the door, and they didn’t have a grenade launcher—thank God—but they did have guns, and the moment the truck blew out of the warehouse, they started shooting.
“Get down!” Pete screamed, ducking down as far as he could without completely losing sight of the land in front of them.
He could hear bullets hitting the body of the truck, and thought for a moment that with their luck, someone was going to hit the gas tank and the thing was going to explode, just like in one of those movies.
Or a bullet would come right through the glass and take one of them out. More brains splattered across a surface for him to have to look at. And this time they’d belong to someone he actually needed alive.
But it turned out that the villagers weren’t great shots—maybe because they were shooting at a moving target in the pitch dark—and after about thirty seconds of driving with his eyes barely above the dashboard, the shots behind them trailed off.
Either the villagers were already giving up—which he doubted—or they’d run for the other trucks, intent on taking out Pete’s newly acquired Humvee.
Pete didn’t let up. He mashed down on the accelerator and headed for the forest. There probably wasn’t a road in there. But there was cover. And right now, that seemed to matter a whole lot more than anything as mundane as a road.
“Take a right!” Jack shouted.
“What?” Pete shouted back—as he jerked the wheel toward the right, his military training coming through at the directness of the order before his brain told him that he should ask the question of why they were doing it. “What’s to the right?” he asked after they’d straightened out again.
“The road out of town,” Jack replied.
“The road that takes us toward Anchorage,” Pete said, remembering now that he’d seen that very thing on the map in Thomas’ office.
The map that was now sitting in one of the bags that was sharing the backseat with Jack.
“Though it’s not going to do us much good,” he continued. “I’m betting that the people from Clearview are going to take three seconds to guess that this is the way we came. And they probably know a faster way to Anchorage than we can find. If they beat us there, it’s going to ruin any chance of hiding.”
“We’ll have the night,” Jack said from right next to him.
Pete jumped and looked to his right, shocked to see Jack’s face hovering there in the dark, between his seat and Marie’s.
“Jesus,” he muttered. “Don’t sneak up on me like that.”
“He’s in the same car as us, Pete,” Marie said from Jack’s other side. “I think you can sort of count on him being present. What do you mean we have the night?” she asked Jack.
“I mean,” Jack said, “that whether Thomas is dead or not, he’s out of commission, and Clearview doesn’t exactly have a strong line of succession.”
“Line of succession?” Pete asked, partially surprised that Jack knew a word like that and partially surprised at the implication. “You mean leadership?”
He hit the lights—which hadn’t been on yet—and then started twisting knobs to try to get the heat to come on. He was colder than he’d ever been in his life, and as long as they were in a vehicle with heat, he was going to take advantage of it. Three jabs and he felt air start to leak out of the car around his feet. It wasn’t hot yet, but it would be.
And that alone was going to make him feel a whole lot better about their chances of surviving the night. Even if they decided to pull over and hide, they’d have the heater to keep them company.
“Leadership,” Jack confirmed. “Thomas didn’t believe in naming a second. Said it was dangerous to his ability to lead us. I think he thought that if he had a second-in-command, people might choose that person over him and start a revolution. He never even trusted the same person from one day to the next. So there’s not going to be an easy transfer, there. It’ll be total chaos. I figure it’ll take them at least tonight before they figure out that Hilda’s the natural choice.”
The man was a freaking wonder. One minute he was so proud of himself that he’d helped to steal trucks that he could hardly stand it, and the next he was breaking out with his opinion of who should take over leadership of Clearview, like he’d put a whole lot of thought into it.
Maybe he had multiple personalities. And one of them was just really stupid.
“And when they do, they’ll be coming after us,” Pete said, carrying the thought to the next level.
“Definitely. You shot their leader and stole from them, and in Clearview, those are the biggest sins possible.”
Pete didn’t miss the change from ”our leader” to ”their leader,” and the idea that Jack was now actually committed to joining him made him feel a little bit bad about his previous ”really stupid” thought.
“We need to find safety, then,” he said.
“Anchorage,” Marie replied. “It’s the only choice.”
“And according to Thomas, they don’t have electricity there
, either,” Pete noted. “How is that going to help us?”
“Don’t be so gullible, Pete,” she noted firmly. “For all you know, Thomas was lying about that, just to screw us up. And it doesn’t matter, anyhow. Even if Anchorage doesn’t have any power, it does have Clyde’s warehouse. We need what’s inside that warehouse.”
He’d forgotten about the warehouse in the struggle to get them all out of Clearview alive. But now that he’d been reminded, he remembered what was supposed to be in there. Cars that would work—though now they had one of those. Radios that were old enough to still be functional. And with any luck, food and water.
Clyde might have been insane, but he’d thought that something big was coming, and he’d somehow made the necessary preparations for it. If they could get to Anchorage, they could take advantage of those preparations.
Thinking about using Clyde’s hard-earned booty made him smile. He’d killed the man back in Mueller, and he hadn’t regretted it. As far as he could see, the guy’d had it coming for a long time. Using his stuff just felt like karma at its finest, after what Clyde had done to him.
“Anchorage it is, then,” he said. “Jack, there’s a map in the bag I packed that should give us a good idea of how long it’s going to take to get there.”
Marie, who had thrown open the glovebox, held up her hand. “No need,” she said. “I’ve got a map right here. One of those old-fashioned ones with street names and everything. Looks like the guys that originally drove this truck wanted to make sure they could get wherever they were going even if their phones stopped working.”
“Terrific,” Pete replied. “Marie, you’re our navigator. Jack, keep your eyes peeled for other headlights. I want to know if anyone is coming after us long before they get here. Let’s get to Anchorage.”
He hit the accelerator even harder, more secure at driving in the snow now, and tore into the darkness, his focus on the city ahead—and the things he hoped they’d find there.
Chapter 10
For the first hour, they drove with such intensity and focus that no one had time for much talking, and Pete liked that just fine. His eyes spent half the time on the road in front of them, which twisted and turned through the incredibly dark Alaskan forest, and half on the rearview mirror, watching for other lights on the road.
Yes, he’d told Jack to watch out for other people. But he didn’t trust the man as far as he could throw him when it came to actually keeping his eyes open. Sure, the guy had turned out to be pretty handy in Clearview when it came to insider information, but that didn’t mean the guy was playing with a full set of cards.
He was at least three cards short of a full deck, as far as Pete was concerned.
Just look at what had happened back at Thomas’ house. And honestly, it had been way too easy to trick the man the first time he and Marie had been in prison.
He’d also never done well with trusting other people, particularly when it came to life-or-death situations. So he was just as happy to take the additional responsibility on himself.
Marie had also been quiet, spending some of her time studying the map with the flashlight and some of it watching the land around them. When she noticed Pete’s eyes shifting back and forth between the road ahead of them and the road behind, she finally said something about it.
“Least it’s going to be easy to spot anyone who comes after us. This place is so freaking dark that no one could hide a set of headlights, even if they were trying.”
“All the curves are going to make it trickier, though,” Pete answered. “It’s not like Alaska has provided us with a straight road with miles and miles of visibility behind us.”
“Good thing we have—” Marie turned around, no doubt expecting to see Jack with his eyes on the road behind them, but stopped herself mid-sentence and changed directions. “Actually, scratch that. Our fearless insider has evidently decided it’s a good time to take a little catnap.”
Pete snorted at that and shook his head. “You mean The Mouth? I was wondering how he was suddenly managing to keep himself so quiet.”
Marie giggled at the nickname. “Be nice,” she said, her voice mock-stern. “The guy saved our lives several times back there.”
“And the last time I checked, we saved him right back. Thomas wasn’t exactly going to throw him a party tomorrow morning. Honestly, I would have been surprised to hear that he made it through the entire night. Thomas doesn’t exactly seem like the forgiving sort.”
“Which is exactly why we needed to bring him with us,” she said simply, her voice light and sing-songy, like she was completely in the right. “Told you I was good at spotting people we could use amongst our enemies.”
“I believe your exact words were slightly different,” Pete muttered, remembering how Marie had presented it to him in the prison. She’d been real keen on the idea of using the prisoners as allies to defeat Clyde and get them all out alive.
Personally, he’d thought they could probably just all be shot. Get them out of the way and make sure they didn’t cause problems later.
Which most of them had. Which he had a mind to remind her of, until she started talking again.
“And yet it was the prisoners that we did make friends with who eventually got us out. Or at least caused enough distraction to allow us to escape. In case you forgot,” she noted.
He ground his teeth. “I didn’t forget.” And he hadn’t. The prisoner he’d dubbed Blackbeard and his friend Harry had managed to light some sort of fire and fill the place with smoke just as David Clyde was setting up a stripped-down cage match between Pete and the one-time warden.
The distraction had given Pete exactly what he needed to surprise Clyde, kill him, and then get himself and Marie out of there.
Unfortunately, he’d had to leave Blackbeard and Harry—and all of the men in his company—behind when they ran. And he didn’t think any of them had made it out alive. The thought that his men had died battling with inmates who should have been safely in their cells was still crippling.
All because they’d had the bad luck of being in the prison when the atmosphere had decided to go crazy and knock out all the power.
“Think we’ll find anything useful in Anchorage?” he asked, his mind moving along as it had been forced to do ever since the blackness had fallen.
“Lots of things,” Marie said immediately, that god-damned optimism shining through every word. “Electricity, if we’re lucky. Law enforcement, at the very least. And not the kind they had back at Mueller, either. And Clyde’s warehouse.”
“If we can find it.”
“We will,” she said firmly.
He shook his head, shocked, as always, at her confidence. “What makes you so sure? Not like we have an address for the place.”
“Because I want that stuff bad enough to kill for it,” she said quietly, a new and very surprising intensity in her voice.
Pete was so surprised that he actually took his eyes off the road and turned to look at her. “You’d kill for it? What happened to the girl who thought everyone deserved a fair shake and that we should use words before we resorted to guns?”
She turned and narrowed her eyes at him in the darkness. “First of all, I never said that. Secondly, the girl who believed that was then captured by a gang of convicts who wanted to kill her, stumbled upon a cabin in the woods where some lunatic was in the habit of killing prisoners for their organs, and then found herself in the midst of a village where everyone had gone stark raving mad. She grew up fast.”
Pete turned back to the road, the corner of his mouth twitching. Because he felt sorry for that original version of Marie. At least, he felt a little bit sorry for her. But this new version? The one who could handle a gun and was suddenly a bit more jaded about the world?
This was a version of Marie that he could definitely learn to like.
Not that he was going to tell her that. He’d never hear the end of it.
“I’m fucking exhausted,” he said half a
n hour later. “You up for taking a turn behind the wheel?”
“Not on your life,” she retorted. “I don’t do driving in the snow, and I don’t drive anything this big. It would be dangerous for all of us if I tried. And I don’t think cannon fire would be enough to wake up our snoring friend back there.”
“I’m telling you, The Mouth,” he said. “He’s got a bigger mouth than anyone I’ve ever met. Turns out it’s good for snoring, too.”
Marie chuckled. “My point stands. I wouldn’t trust him to drive, anyhow. He’d put us in the nearest snowbank and then try to convince us that it had appeared out of nowhere or something.”
“And yet I’m too tired to keep driving,” Pete reminded her. “I might end up doing the same thing. Without the good excuse of the snowbank just appearing out of nowhere. Or the pretty face to back it up.”
“He’s not that pretty,” Marie retorted. “I notice he hasn’t exactly found a wife yet. Besides, that doesn’t change the fact that I don’t want to drive, either. I’ve been up just as long as you have. And I’m not in the National Guard. I’m not used to all this rough-and-tumble stuff.”
“So our choice is crash into a snowbank or pull off the road and sleep,” Pete said, refraining from pushing the comment about Jack’s appearance any further.
After all, it wasn’t like he cared whether Marie thought the guy was handsome. Hell, he sort of wanted to shoot himself in the head for even having had the thought at all.
Probably just because he was delirious with fatigue, he told himself. He’d slept last night but it hadn’t been a restful sleep—it never was, when he was in a new place and amongst people he didn’t know if he trusted—and today had been one hell of an eventful day.
Topped off by stealing a Humvee and driving into the night like it was something he did all the damn time. Like he was some sort of action hero in a movie or something, and none of this was any big deal.
This whole situation was fucking ridiculous.
Instead of carrying on the conversation, he decided to make an executive decision. After all, that was what action heroes in movies did, right? He spotted a likely turn-out place and swerved off the road and into deeper snow.
Stone Cold Fear | Book 3 | Ice Burn Page 5
